One of the most consistent complaints we hear from the community is the lack of ICANN materials – reports, announcements, webpages and so on – in languages other than English.

We have been working hard on this for nearly two years and ICANN now has a translation manager as well as a decent size budget and much better internal systems for putting things through translation. The amount of translation we do (and interpretation at meetings) has jumped and we are doing it at lower cost and with greater accuracy than ever before.

But we recognize that this is only a partial solution. The ICANN website is the main entry point to the organization and it remains defiantly English. While we translate more documents than every before, only a tiny proportion of our webpages are in other languages, making it hard for community members to find those translated documents and to keep up to date with ICANN and its work.

ICANN is becoming a more multilingual organization and in doing so has spent a year, with some expert help and plenty of useful feedback from the community, developing and implementing a translation programme.

We have now reached the stage where we need someone with sufficient expertise and experience to be able to oversee that programme as ICANN moves to making translation a part of its everyday processes and systems.